Lovely spot, Dreamdeer, but I'm a typical cowardly female. I'll skip the tarantulas and rattlers, thank you very much..I'm not sure what the population of the Shire would be if they had snakes! (good question for The Professor methinks?) . Though I am sure that if you are one of the desert tribes there's all sorts of lore and if you are versed in it, then you don't mind them one bit.

This reminds me of a story from the Raiders of the Lost Ark filming. Spielberg said that they had a hard time getting the tarantulas on that guy's back in the opening sequence to move )you kmow, when he was getting the Idol) so he asked the "tarantula wrangler" what to do. (Spielberg wanted them to be crawling down his back.) The wrangler told him they were all males, so they had to put a female one on there. So they did, and BOY did they start to move...LOL)

I spent a large part of my childhood at my grandma's house on Keuka Lake, a waterfront property in central NY State, in a country of rolling hills and valleys, where they grow wine grapes. In fact, before Cali, This area was the wine capital of the US...it looks a lot like the San Fernendo Valley. It is a beautful place, though the Finger Lakes area has a reputation for spawning mystics and crazy people. Visionaries, etc. The founder of the Mormons is said to have had his vision here, and the leader of the women's movement, Mrs Stanton, came from here. At night, the mist rolls blue across the Lake; it takes a long time for the mist to clear from the hills. Nowadays, the area is becoming gentrified, with more and more fat cats from NYC and Jersey buying up the homes. (My hope is that the housing market will get so bad that they'll be proced out and have to leave, and property vzalues will go down again.) It is an area of villages and resort homes, but also a lot of Amish live here, up in the hill areas and valleys, where they grow wheat and corn. Organically. You can stop at a farm road in summer and buy the biggest strawberries, the best fruit you ever will get.

Keuka Lake is tempermental. In Seneca it means "crooked lake" (as Adirondack means "bark eater", and Lake George's origional name was Lake Atiaronocte.) I love Native American lore. (I began my love of trees after finishing Black Elk Speaks, and a novel called " Hanta Yo" by Ruth Beebe Ellis.) ....If a storm blows up on the Lake, watch out....the lake is shaped like a Y,--it is 17 miles long, and the fork of the Y is in the dead middle--and in the middle, during a storm, it forms a whirlpool. The seven Finger Lakes are said to be connected by an underground cavern. It is said that a town 30 miles south of Keuka Lake, called Horseheads, got its name in the 1820's when a farmer driving his wagon team next to the Lake got sucked out in a storm and a few weeks later the skeletons of the horses, still in harness, were found washed up on the river bed.